Welcome back! We’ve challenged ourselves with a vegan week!.

Breakfast. Carrot•Apple•Lemon•Ginger Juice.

I’ve been loving my new Breville Juicer Fountain Plus! I’ve been mainly relying on Pinterest for juice recipes, but have also gotten some great recipes from friends who’ve been juicing for years. This one was simple, 4 carrots + 2 apples + 3″ ginger (I like it really sharp!) + 1 oz fresh lemon juice mixed in at the end (because I already had some squeezed, I didn’t need to put any in the juicer). It was so delicious!! I can’t wait to use juice as my breakfasts throughout the week. We went golfing in the morning and the juice + coffee was enough to hold me over through all 9 holes.

Lunch. Banana•Pineapple•Orange•Berry Smoothie

A lot of people have asked for this smoothie recipe, and for smoothie recipes in general. First off, Kyle made this one and definitely just threw it together: roughly 1 banana, 1 handful frozen pineapple, 2 handfuls frozen berries, 2 oranges peeled, all thrown in a VitaMix blender and blended until smooth. Crazy delicious and because fo the frozen fruits & banana, I didn’t notice the missing yogurt. I plan on having mostly smoothies for lunch, so I’ll be better about sharing the recipes!

Snack. Celery & Carrots + Peanut Butter

It’s so simple, yet so satisfying.

Dinner. Vegan Mapo Tofu served over jasmine rice with boo choy

We really rely on Serious Eats, and specifically Kenji Lopez-Alt of The Food Lab when searching for new recipes or something only specific like this. For our first dinner, we decided to make Mapo Tofu- but, despite the misleading name, it’s not just tofu in the dish, there’s also ground beef and beef broth!

Keji for the win, has a recipe that replaces the beef elements with mushrooms! Honestly, if I didn’t know that something was missing from it, I wouldn’t know. Kyle said that he would definitely make it again if we were having vegetarian or vegan friends over for dinner, but since it’s marginally better with beef, he’d prefer it that way.

Now, as you might have read before, we’re very aware of the caloric health of food and the macronutrients. Kyle is a pretty serious weight lifter and he’s used to eating 12-16 oz of meat / night, along with chicken at lunch. That’s over 110 grams of protein/day. By contrast, in this vegan mayo tofu dish, there’s about 1000 calories worth of oil and only 24g protein in the whole thing. We don’t usually calorie count on the weekends, and let ourselves just focus on how tasty foods are, and enjoy some more decadent delicious bites. However, as the week goes on, I will share with y’all the macro nutrients of our vegan dishes, in case that matters to you too :).

Dessert. Coconut Lime Grenita

Using our little Zoku Ice Cream Maker, Kyle mixed up some coconut milk, palm sugar, lime zest, and a little squeeze of lime juice to make the base for this awesome vegan ice cream! We only used about 1/4 cup of the mixture into our pre-frozen Zoku and stirred away for 10 minutes. We let it sit in the freezer for another 20 and then enjoyed watching The Chef Show with our first vegan dessert.

Cocktails.

We used some of our super fast-growing mint to make mojitos, then went to a walk towards Whole Foods, for some more ingredients and passed by this rosemary bush! I think they call this “urban foraging.” Using a recipe from The One Bottle Cocktail, and this freegan rosemary, we whipped up a rosemary hibiscus syrup, mixed it with fresh lemon juice and mezcal to make a Sassy Flower.

Dear Diary,

At the end of Day 1 of our Vegan Week Challenge, I felt… like a lightweight! Over the course of more than four hours, I had four cocktails and felt like they hit me pretty hard. I was surprised as how well the juice held me over through golf, but definitely noticed that I didn’t have as much energy as I normally would afterwards– post lunch & post grocery shopping, I took a 1.5 hours nap! As a side note, apart from the gluten in our soy sauce, it was also a gluten-free day!

To read more about our Vegan Week Challenge, click here.

To read more about why we opted for a vegan week challenge, click here.

Read about Vegan Week Day 2